


All the Happy Places

by Major



Category: Prodigal Son (TV 2019)
Genre: F/M, Friendship, Getting Together, Humor, Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-13 03:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29272071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Major/pseuds/Major
Summary: Malcolm bumps into Edrisa at a weapons fair.Sometimes the heart needs a nudge.  All Malcolm’s needs is an anvil, a mace, and a really big ax.
Relationships: Malcolm Bright/Edrisa Tanaka
Comments: 18
Kudos: 60
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	All the Happy Places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cat2000](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cat2000/gifts).



Kindness was not a prerequisite for joining the NYPD. Or the FBI. Or, really, junior high. Malcolm learned early on as the son of the Surgeon that some people took up cruelty as a hobby and ran with it. It wasn’t a gold star activity, but it was a very fulfilling outlet for people with all variations of anger management issues and aggression disorders. It gave him a template for dealing with bullies: assess, diagnose, and dismiss without taking it personally. It usually served him quite well.

Other times, understanding the origins of someone’s animosity towards him did little to soothe the sting of the insults being hurled. A run-in with some cops that didn’t like him and weren’t afraid to tell him exactly why, loudly and to his face, put a damper on the whole weapons fair he’d spent the last three weeks feeling excited to attend.

He almost called it quits and went home to play with the weapons he had there when a familiar voice made him stop in the grassy pathway between the snow cone booth and the one displaying 19th Century Tulwar battle swords with serrated blades. He’d glanced at them earlier. They were fakes. The voice was past it in a wide clearing where the ax displays were. He paused on the edge and smiled. Yes. It was Edrisa’s voice attached to Edrisa herself.

“This is way lighter than I would have thought for something that looks like the weapon a troll would choose while running out of his cave for war.” The presenter looked nervous as Edrisa hefted the huge ax up by its intricately carved wooden handle. “I feel like I could slaughter orcs with this thing, no problem.”

She twirled in a sudden 180 that cruised the giant ax in a wide arc as she spun, and Malcolm had to jump back to save his stomach from a near evisceration. Edrisa yipped and dropped it, and he tilted his head away with half a smile. That was on him. Never approach someone with an enormous medieval weapon without announcing yourself.

“Bright!”

His half smile became a full one. “Edrisa. What are you doing here?”

The presenter took the window of her distraction to collect his ax and hurry back to his booth with it.

“Oh!” She looked mildly chagrined.

He liked that look on her. It always seemed like she was up to something, but his sleuthing only uncovered things like her collection of tiny music boxes and the closet of costumes she kept, including pictures of her on the door dressed in authentic KISS hair and makeup, that was not for Halloween. She was a safe mystery that he was fond of solving.

“Well,” she told him, “you’ve been talking this fair up for weeks. I thought I’d check it out for myself. But you mentioned you’d be coming tomorrow? That’s why I came today.”

He didn’t follow. “Why didn’t you tell me if you wanted to come? I would have enjoyed the company.”

“Oh, no, no, no. I didn’t want to bother you. Or invite myself to tag along.” Her confused squint became uncertainty and blew quickly into a nervous retreat. “In fact, I’ll go. I’ll come back tomorrow. Or never! And you can enjoy the fair in peace.”

Peace was an overrated and, he was beginning to suspect, unachievable state of being. At least for the Whitlys.

“Please stay,” he said in both insistence and invitation. “I mean it. I would enjoy the company. Have you had a snow cone yet? I’ll get you a snow cone.”

Her face lit up as only hers could, full of abrupt and insuppressible joy. The kind that always set him at ease. “Ooh, blue or red? No! Surprise me. Just don’t do the thing where they mix the syrups together into an icy brown sludge. No, wait, do it because I wouldn’t expect it and that would be the ultimate surprise.” She confused herself, face scrunched up in consideration. “But I guess I’ll expect it now.”

Malcolm chuckled quietly and placed his hand on her back to steer her over towards the main path of booths.

“A surprise snow cone of undetermined syrup,” he promised. “And then civil war cannons.”

“There are cannons here?!”

“Oh, there’s an active display here in an hour.”

Edrisa squealed with excitement, and Malcolm stole a second glance at her in line at the snow cone booth. It was a simple thing to take pleasure in like-minded company. It was also a distracting thing. She spent the day at his side asking interesting questions, and he forgot to be self-conscious about his vast knowledge of all things murder.

He forgot all about the cops that ruined his morning, because Edrisa put it back together and made his whole afternoon. They shared a cab back to the city and walked home covered in soot after standing too close to some minor explosives that went off in a stone chimney. Their hair was pointed everywhere, their clothes were victimized beyond repair. Edrisa didn’t notice the strange looks they caught, as engrossed as she was in telling him about her appreciation for expanding her knowledge of weaponry after a case involving a tough autopsy and a slow match of the wound to a bagh nakh. It made it easier for Malcolm to ignore the looks too. He surprised Sunshine with a cheerful smile after a long day when he entered his apartment. She sang to him in turn, and he whistled back.

****

Seeing Edrisa’s enthusiasm for the specialty weapons prompted Malcolm to invite her over to show him his own collection. She was active in her listening, paying attention because she found it as interesting as he did and not out of politeness. He worried sometimes that he pushed his oddness on people in ways that made them uncomfortable. It wasn’t always immediately obvious when he was doing it, but he didn’t have to worry about that with her. Edrisa grinned and gasped and wanted to know everything about everything, which was amazing because he liked telling her everything about everything. Weapons were fun. They didn’t have to be creepy.

“Can we play with these?” Edrisa picked up a sword, and he stepped out of her range. It was a close call, but he was having so much fun that he didn’t want to spoil the afternoon with all the fine print about proper safety protocols. “You were super good at sword wrestling, right?”

Malcolm ducked his head with a short laugh. “Fencing. I was accomplished. And we can. I mean, I can show you some moves, but not with these. An accident with these—”

“And you’re hiding my body to keep from getting arrested because everybody will assume that you chopped my head off on purpose because of your dad and how half the people at the precinct think that you’re a cuckoo clock ready to _jump out_ and start your own body count at any moment.”

He opened his mouth but abruptly closed it on all of the many responses that got choked up behind one question. “How many think that? Ballpark?”

“It’s not important.” Edrisa slashed the sword through the air, and this time, Malcolm did step in and take it from her to protect her head and, apparently, to prevent his future as an innocent man on the run.

He got out the wooden practice swords he kept and showed her some moves after dragging the coffee table out of the way for their bout, first her stance and then some beginner’s moves. She managed to score against him right at the start, and he blinked in surprise at his failed block.

He assessed her in suspicion. “Are you hustling me?”

She grinned, twirling the hilt of the practice sword and abruptly dropping it with a little jump. It was definitely not a hustle.

“I have fantastic luck with beginner’s luck,” she explained. “I once won a hand of poker against Texas Dolly when I went through a card counting phase in Vegas. First time at the table. Also, the last. I can’t go back to Nevada.” She winced. “I owe a lot of money to a man named Boogie.”

Malcolm narrowed his eyes on her with a growing smile. He would be the first in line for a signed copy if she ever wrote a biography, The Dreese: A Memoir.

“Or maybe I’m just awesome,” she suggested, “and you kind of suck at this.”

He pointed his sword at her in warning.

“That’s a yellow card,” he teased.

She was unswayed by his threat and reset her stance, sword raised.

“En garde!” she exclaimed.

“Pret!” he called back.

“Allez!” Edrisa shot forward, and Malcolm dodged. Their swords clacked as they collided, and he lost ground to her from amusement alone when it became clear that her beginner’s luck had worn off and she was terrible. They continued the friendly game until he fell over on the couch from laughter. Neither kept score, and he declared her the winner.

****

Malcolm stopped himself just around the corner at the precinct at the sound of heated voices in the next hall. One, he recognized as Officer Monroe, no fan of his. The other belonged to Edrisa, and he almost kept walking to intervene when he heard the animosity coming from Monroe but stopped himself at the surprising return of tone from her. She was holding her own, whatever the disagreement was about.

“That guy doesn’t belong here,” Monroe said. “We close cases just fine without help from the Surgeon’s bastard kid.”

Ah. So he was the disagreement. Of course.

“First of all,” Edrisa retorted, and Malcolm looked at the ceiling as he listened, “Bright is not a bastard. Okay? Dr. Whitly totally claimed him. So you’re just sloppy with your insults.”

A flicker of a smile curved his lips.

“And secondly, Malcolm Bright is an amazing profiler that’s done more to help people in the short time he’s been consulting for the NYPD than you could ever hope to in your entire career. So there! And also, I don’t like the smell of your cologne. It’s pungent!”

The sound of her footsteps stomping off in the other direction got Malcolm walking again. Monroe looked over at him as he approached and stiffened.

“What are you so happy about?” he barked at him as he passed.

Malcolm shrugged. “Making friends wasn’t always easy for me growing up. You know, the whole ‘my dad murdered lots of people’ thing. But you know?” He turned to walk backwards a couple of steps as he nodded at him. “I think I’ve finally got the hang of it.”

Monroe rolled his eyes at him, and Malcolm didn’t care at all.

****

On his way out of the morgue that afternoon to follow Gil and the rest of the team on a case, Malcolm dropped a big handful of cherry lollipops on an empty exam table. Edrisa brightened at the sight of the mound and opened her mouth, but he said it before she could.

“Thank you.”

She gave him a quizzical look, but he only smiled on his way out.

****

It wasn’t enough to close cases. A frequent consultant for the police had to be considered mentally stable as well. It was asking for too many tricks from one magician in Malcolm’s opinion, but that opinion was neither here nor there to the NYPD and he was shadowed by an officer whose report on him was going to be turned over to the therapist assigned to examine his mental fitness at the end of the month. He wasn’t doing swimmingly.

It got worse when the rest of the team had already left an outdoor crime scene to return back to the drawing board and only he, Edrisa, and the officer staring at his every move remained. There hadn’t been a body at this scene, only a mannequin the killer had put on display in the style in which he’d killed the previous victim to taunt them. Malcolm fidgeted, uncomfortable in his own skin with his expectations unfulfilled. He’d needed a new body. His hand shook hard at his side.

The officer was turning to return to his dedicated post of staring relentlessly at Malcolm, but Edrisa caught sight of his shaking hand first and snatched it up in one of hers before the officer could take note.

“Bye!” she said loudly and startlingly to the man, already turning Malcolm around towards the park exit and back to the city. “There’s no more to do here. Everything is going to the lab and results will take hours. Bright won’t be back at the precinct until tomorrow!”

The officer watched them suspiciously, but both he and Malcolm could do nothing as Edrisa held his hand tightly in hers and led him away from his dangerously perceptive eyes. She only released his hand when they were too far away for the officer to notice his hand if it did it again.

She glanced down where he flexed it now that it wasn’t being crushed in her hold. “I assume you’ve had that tremor checked out for any possible physical cause? It can indicate a nervous system or neurological disorder. It’s a symptom of Parkinson’s as well.”

He glanced back, but his shadow was gone, off to do whatever he did when he wasn’t burning holes in him with his eyes.

“Yes. And it’s not any of those things.” After a pause, he admitted what she already knew, “It’s psychological.”

There was no judgment in her face at that. He checked for it. There was only solemn understanding, which he could appreciate. Most people heard he was a head case and judged or put distance between him and them like he might pop out of a jack-in-the-box with an ax in his hand. Neither felt great.

“Thought so,” she said.

Edrisa was great in many ways. One of those ways was that he knew she would let it go there. She wouldn’t push or spotlight the obvious just because it was there and loud and unavoidable. She’d let him off the hook. Oddly, however, he felt an urge (like an instinct to move towards the sound of rushing water after stumbling through the desert) to climb up on that hook and hold on.

“It’s my father,” he explained. “Because of course it is. Any single point of my life, important or trivial, can be traced back to my father. But not my father, the man; my father, the Surgeon, and all the finer details of what comes with that nom de plume.”

Edrisa’s nose wrinkled in curiosity as they stepped off the bike path onto the grass to avoid a cyclist. “Is it a nom de plume if he didn’t choose it?”

No matter. “He refers to it as his professional title.”

“Well, technically!” Edrisa lifted a finger at the double entendre since Martin Whitly did, in fact, make his living as an actual surgeon.

“Yes, he thinks he’s very clever. He isn’t. What he is can be summed up in one very useful, easy to remember, scarring word: evil.”

“Hence, the tremor.”

“Hence, my life,” he corrected her assessment.

“Bright.” She stopped walking.

He turned to her, brow raised with interest, but she set a match to the end of the thread of their conversation and the flame singed the whole thing in one puzzling gulp.

“Would you like to drop anvils off the roof with me?” she asked.

He opened his mouth to respond but snapped it shut. That was not at all what he expected, which may have been his favorite thing about Edrisa. He could profile her until he was blue in the face, but she could still surprise him. There was value in her brand of bizarre unpredictability. It was almost a relief to be around her and not know everything she would say or do at any given moment based on details he’d assessed within moments of being in her company.

He had no idea what she was talking about, but his afternoon was clear and his head was not.

“Yes,” he said and let her lead. It was nice to follow and not know where he was going.

****

The anvils were watermelons, and the building was a clinic where she volunteered in her spare time. A nurse guarded the back exit to ensure no unsuspecting patients left in the wrong direction and got creamed by a giant fruit dropping at high velocity.

There was something immensely cathartic about dropping, throwing, and pushing them over the edge and watching them splatter down below. He felt lighter with life simplified to a friend he could trust to put a watermelon in his hands after opening up about his serial killer father. He shared a lingering smile with her as they hefted the heaviest one they’d brought with them together and gave it a great heave with synchronized shouts. The watermelon died a fantastically explosive death on the pavement below. And Malcolm’s hand didn’t tremble for the rest of the afternoon.

****

Malcolm walked up to the door of the morgue but stopped. He started to turn back around but hesitated in his retreat as well. He was being stupid. Returning to the door, he raised his hand to knock but paused his fist as he realized what he was doing and rolled his eyes at himself. He needed to get it together. Shoving away his ridiculous hesitation, he pushed his way into the morgue.

Edrisa stood by a counter with a folder in her hand and looked up when she heard him, friendly and receptive as ever. Because she was always that way, and he was being silly. He blamed it on his somewhat stunted ability to both make and maintain normal, healthy friendships, and let it go. Sometimes it wasn’t the behavior that was important but acknowledging, accepting, and moving on when he realized he was doing it.

“Bright!” She gestured to the empty tables. “I don’t have a new body for you, but the day is young. I’m sure any number of people could die in mysterious ways before my shift is over.”

He enjoyed her optimism. “Right?”

She nodded encouragingly. “What’s got you smiling? Did you win something?” Her gaze became shrewd. “Was it the lottery? You should donate it to charity, if so. Everyone knows the lottery is cursed.”

Alas.

“The only time I’ve won the lottery was with my father,” he said, dry as toast. “No. My smile comes with an invitation.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” There was no explanation for the sudden uncertainty that nearly stopped him from issuing said invitation, and he ignored how close it skirted to nervousness in its entirety. “There is an exhibit on strange murders throughout history at the museum this weekend, and I was wondering if you would like to accompany me?”

That wasn’t weird, right? To invite somebody to ogle over gruesome reconstructions of famous and little-known death scenes with incredible detail paid to realism? Right? “I have a brochure!”

He pulled it out of his inside jacket pocket and thrust the leaflet out in offering. He’d picked it up when he heard about it and thought twice, then a third time, and a fourth about whether or not to ask her to go with him. Friends did that, didn’t they? They hung out and participated in activities together when there was a shared interest. There was no reason that murder had to be any different from dinner and a movie. Though, that made it sound like a date, and this wasn’t that. This was them, and they were most definitely not that.

Still, when she grinned up at him in excitement and hopped up on a stool to thumb through the brochure, getting as worked up at the example photos as he had when he picked it up, there was relief under his careful attention to her enthusiasm and observations. He buried it—repression was his specialty after all—and dragged a stool next to hers at the counter. They bent in close, heads together, as they flipped through the advertisement for the exhibit. She noticed an anomaly in a murder photo they didn’t recognize, and they spent her lunch hour trying to explain it.

She had three pages of notes by the time they had to get back to work, and he had plans for the weekend with an actual human being that wasn’t his mother or Ainsley or, most importantly, his father. If he kept this up, he’d conquer normalcy by middle age. Not bad for a guy that spawned from Martin (and Jessica) Whitly. He’d be all murdered out by his retirement. He’d pick up new hobbies. Tennis or golf.

He wondered if Edrisa liked tennis as a player or a spectator.

Anyway, he thought as he left the morgue, it was good to have goals.

****

The museum drew a bigger crowd than Malcolm expected, but the feeling of camaraderie reduced back down to him and Edrisa when he noticed that the group outside of their twosome cringed away from the exhibits as they moved through the guided tour. They covered their eyes with many sprinkles of ‘ew’ and ‘ugh’ throughout. He and Edrisa pulled ahead while the guide was presenting an impressively realistic exhibit of dead bodies with top-grade special effects to a gagging crowd of spectators. Edrisa’s small hand on the cuff of his coat pulled him forward while everyone else was distracted, and they trotted down the hallway to the next exhibit alone.

“Too much chatter,” Edrisa said in explanation for the impromptu escape.

Malcolm was happy to leave the others behind. “Not enough appreciation for the artwork. Did you see that bulging eye?”

“See it? _My_ eyes popped out of their sockets just looking at it. But you know what was way cooler? The way that femur—”

“—burst out the abdominal wall!” they finished in unison, and Edrisa chuckled back a step as he nodded.

“Crush injuries, man. It’s like crumbling a piece of paper into a ball,” she said with a tight squeeze of her fist in demonstration. “Only bloodier.”

“Much,” he agreed. “Hey, are you hungry? I could go for food after this.”

He needed to be sure, though, because two separate people had exited the tour early looking so green that he didn’t have much hope for whatever they’d last eaten surviving digestion. Edrisa showed no signs of queasiness.

“For sure, I’m starved. Hey, is that a finger or a toe?” she asked as she leaned forward over the red velvet rope separating them from the exhibit of the horse-trampled fake dead guy.

Malcolm leaned over the rope at her side and squinted at the scene. He and Edrisa cocked their heads in their inspection.

“I think,” he mused, “it’s a… phallus.”

Dawning came over her and she nodded with a wince. “Poor guy. I hope that’s not to scale.”

Malcolm grinned but turned quickly towards the sound of the rest of the group approaching from around the corner and snatched Edrisa’s hand. He tugged her away from the rope, and they sprinted as quietly as they could down the next hall to stay ahead and out of sight. It was much better just the two of them. They observed, minded their volume, and kept moving. Sometimes Malcolm’s hand held Edrisa’s through their observations since he was just going to have to grab it and pull her down another corner again anyway.

****

They ended up outside Amsterdam Billiards on the way home. Malcolm was about to flag a cab for Edrisa but realized it was Friday. That was JT’s date night with his wife. He was here every Friday. With a grin, he took Edrisa’s elbow and led her to the door, all too happy to draw the evening out. The exhibit had been fun, and her company made it all the better. He wasn’t ready to let that go yet.

“I’m not much for pool,” Edrisa said with some skepticism when she saw where he was trying to take her. “I once deviated a guy’s septum with the butt of a pool cue. The worst part was, I wasn’t playing. I was kind of drunk and thought I could twirl it like a baton. I couldn’t.” She became thoughtful. “I’m not good with batons either.”

“And I’d love to hear all about the injuries you inflicted with those. Inside. With JT and pool and beer.” And more conversation about the museum. It had been a long time since he had that much fun. “Please?”

Edrisa shifted, but she was crumbling. “He won’t be mad?”

“JT? Not a chance. He loves it when I crash his dates.” That was an overstatement. Well, an outright lie. “Okay, I only did it once before and he hated it, but I’m sure this time will be different. Come on.”

“Alright, but I reserve the right to glare when he looks at me like I’m a weirdo, which he will. It’s our thing.”

“Deal,” he said as he opened the door for her, “but it won’t matter. We’ll be weirdos together. There’s power in numbers.”

There wasn’t. JT was glare central at their arrival. Tally and Edrisa hit it off, but Malcolm could tell JT was chugging more beer than he normally would have at some of the conversation starters. Yeah, Edrisa maybe shouldn’t have led with the thing about the intestines when she mentioned their museum trip, but JT looked way more freaked out than his wife did. They played pool against each other (it was not a close game but nothing on Malcolm’s face was deviated by the end of it so that was its own win), and Edrisa tagged along with JT to the bar after they were annihilated a second time.

He was smiling after her at the pool table when Tally leaned over and tapped his arm. “JT told me about what happened last year with Eve. It’s good to see you putting yourself out there again.”

Malcolm’s smile fell as he caught her meaning, but the song on the jukebox changed and stole Tally’s attention. He didn’t have a chance to correct her before JT and Edrisa were back with more drinks.

“I think alcohol actually improves my coordination. It’s a freak act of nature,” Edrisa said as she bumped her hip into the pool table and sloshed her beer with a giddy smile. “Let’s crush these losers.”

JT’s face reached the summit of Mount Glare, and Malcolm broke into a wide smile.

“Let’s,” he agreed.

They tapped their beers in cheers to their projected victory and went on to face crushing defeat. He wasn’t sure he’d ever enjoyed losing so much.

****

His nightmares were bad. Really bad. He’d graduated from remedial nightmares to average, to banking on taking an advanced course in night terrors every day this week. It was no surprise that he was on edge. He teetered somewhere near the slippery part at the end of a cliff where shifting his feet wrong could kick up the rocks and drop him in a hurry if he wasn’t careful, and that was his baseline. With no sleep but a few hours here or there of total misery and horror, he should have been monitoring his mental state and asserting better control over his outward reactions to his present fragility.

He was not.

Hence, what could only be described as a brief but potentially very damaging breakdown during a phone call with his father that could have jeopardized his status as a consultant for the NYPD. If he were in a fragile state then, it could only have escalated from there if he were no longer allowed to work cases. His work centered him. It focused his mind. It gave that place deep inside of him that he feared and hid, that place that was his father passed on into him, a point of focus that was safe. Safe and still good, somehow. He was under review, his every movement and decision being analyzed, and that slip on the phone could have cost him dearly.

The outburst, he might have been able to cover on its own, but the glass in his shaking fist was not the first to shatter under the strength of the grip the past sometimes got around his mind. The officer shadowing him for weeks was just outside, and he would have had to explain himself in a way that didn’t make him look completely insane and unfit for the job while not in a mental state to accomplish that with any ounce of believability. It would all have been over for him.

If not for Edrisa.

She’d been on her way to the interrogation room to deliver some exam results to the team, who mercifully was not gathered yet, and froze in the doorway at both his shout at his father on the phone and the sudden shattering of the glass in his hand. He locked eyes with her, heart slamming to a quick stop in his chest, and the gears turned in her gaze. They had moments, only, but then Edrisa was rushing forward. There were piles of boxes all over the room, packed with evidence and old files the team was slowly combing through the last few days. Edrisa snatched the phone from his hand.

“He has to go now! Bye!” she said to his father and hung up on him, shoving the phone in her pocket at the same time. She gave Malcolm a rough push down towards the floor. He was too shaken by his own flustered state to resist and only had the sense to avoid kneeling in the broken pieces of glass as he knelt at her side behind the table and stacks of boxes.

Officer Shadow, as he’d come to think of him, was in the room the next second.

“What’s going on in here?” he demanded. “Where’s Bright?”

Huddled behind boxes with one hand fisted in the bottom of Edrisa’s lab coat like a little kid grabbing at a security blanket, that was where. All Shadow had to do was walk around the table, and if losing control of himself while chatting on the phone with his serial killer father wasn’t enough to flunk him from this mental test he was taking, crouching and hiding from the officer assigned to review his fitness would do the trick.

“Bright?” Edrisa asked like she’d never heard the name because on the long list of impressive things that she was fantastic at, acting was not one of them. The woman didn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve, she projected it from her sleeve onto an IMAX screen. “Oh, right. Him. Haven’t seen him.”

“I just heard him in here.”

Malcolm couldn’t see the look on his face, but Shadow was a no-nonsense type. Not exceptionally intelligent or perceptive but competent at his job, and Edrisa was basically Pinocchio when she lied. Her nose didn’t grow, but the lie was written just as obviously all over her face. In fact, Pinocchio was probably a better poker player, Edrisa’s beginner’s luck aside.

“I think you heard me,” she told him.

“I heard a man.”

“Nope. That… was me,” she said, and Malcolm cringed for impact rather than braced because there was no way Shadow was going to buy this. “I get… gruff when I’m frustrated. I have a very masculine response to bad luck. It’s a testosterone thing.”

Malcolm could hear Shadow stepping closer.

“No, no, no!” Edrisa threw her hands up. “I broke a glass! I broke it. By accident. And then I got annoyed at the mess and became manly, you know, grr. And that’s what you heard.” She gave him a polite smile and nodded. “But don’t come over here. It’s a minefield of shards.”

“I heard shouting and then something broke,” he argued.

Edrisa tapped her chin and shook her head. “No. It was the other way around. I remember since I was here and it came from me. They have all kinds of puzzle apps to help strengthen memory these days. Maybe that could help you with your chronology issues.”

Malcolm didn’t have to see Shadow’s frown to feel it as he grumbled and left the room, no doubt in search of him. Edrisa looked down at him when the coast was clear.

“Thank you,” Malcolm whispered up at her and slowly coached his hand to release its death grip on her coat.

Edrisa squatted down to be eye level with him, and Malcolm put out a hand to hold her elbow and keep her steady in the midst of all the broken pieces around them. The look of quiet understanding there both warmed and tightened his chest, alone as they were, hidden low in the room.

“Let’s get this cleaned up.” She glanced at the fist that broke the glass, held tight around the fresh cut on his palm that was too shallow to need stitches. “Then we’ll fix you.”

It would take more than a band-aid to do that, but he picked up the broken pieces of glass as she wiped up the water. He liked the sound of it anyway.

****

Edrisa was careful with him. He wasn’t sure what he expected. Yes, she worked primarily with dead people, but her touch was gentle as she cleaned his cut at her desk down in the morgue. She held his hand palm up in one of hers as she gave it a careful look to make sure he didn’t need stitches after all. He didn’t, and he found himself watching her. Watching her take care of him with light touches and studious attention. She was professional and kind. And very worried about him.

He smiled, and it was soft with regret. “I’m sorry if I startled you. And for making you lie for me.”

“You didn’t make me do anything,” she replied as she smoothed the gauze down and wrapped the light bandage around his hand.

“Still,” he reasoned, “you shouldn’t have had to do it. Not that I’m not grateful that you did, but you don’t have to worry about me. I am doing fine. Better than fine. I’m fantastic.”

Edrisa set aside the wrapper for the bandage and pulled her gloves off. “Bright.”

“Yes.” He put on his best chipper smile to set her at ease. It did not work.

“You don’t have to tell me the truth. I get it. But”—she frowned—“don’t lie.”

Right.

He and Edrisa had been spending a lot of time together in the last couple of months: weekends at fairs and museums, having lunch together to pick each other’s brains about interesting historical cases that were yet unsolved, one very memorable Thursday afternoon spin class when they attempted to diverge from their normal morbidly tinged hobbies after Edrisa won free gym membership for herself and a friend off a radio contest for the best Batman impersonation. (She hadn’t been lying to Officer Shadow about her ability to deepen her voice.) Edrisa fell off her bike twice, and Malcolm got yelled at by the instructor who didn’t like it when he pointed out that he spent an uneven amount of time correcting the form of one woman who turned out to be very married and very insulted by the insinuation that they were having an affair. Even though they totally were. It was an awkward class. They went back to murder after that.

He could respect her wish and simply omit the truth, but his eyes flicked up to her from the bandaged hand she mended and he didn’t want to give her that courtesy. They were past omissions and courtesies.

He leaned back in the chair she brought over for him and eyed the empty mug on her desk. “Do you have any more coffee?”

A tentative smile met his own, and she got up to get them both a cup.

“Don’t break this one,” she teased as she came back and handed him a mug.

He drew a deep breath. “I’ll do my best.”

And he did. He opened up about his nightmares and his father, two things irrevocably intertwined. Edrisa listened and he laughed and felt lighter for letting it all go. It didn’t fix him, but he did sleep better. Nothing broke the next day, not in his fist or in his mind. He found himself tracing the bandage on his hand and not thinking about the cut but the gentle fingers that tended it. He could have changed the dressing when he needed to, but he asked Edrisa to do it for him if she had a minute. It turned out she had several.

****

Breakfast with his mother and sister went well. They had a table near a window at the restaurant, and his mother hadn’t once returned anything to the kitchen. Malcolm was slow to finish his food since his stomach was tight with nerves about the results to his assessment that he expected to get today. The good thing was that he was done with Officer Shadow. The bad thing was that he was out of time to prove he was a mentally stable person and wasn’t convinced he’d done a stellar job of presenting his case.

Ainsley pulled him from his nervous thoughts as she asked, “So what are you and Edrisa doing this weekend?”

He looked up in confusion.

“This weekend? We don’t have plans. Did I mention that we did?” He took his phone out and brought up his calendar to check. No. It was clear except for an _E?_ on Friday because there was a seminar on poisons at the university that looked promising. He got swept up in a case and hadn’t asked her if she wanted to go yet.

“No,” Ainsley said. “You guys have been hanging out so much, I just figured you’d be off playing laser tag with skeletons or dressing up in colonial chic and watching a reenactment of the Salem witch trials.”

Malcolm looked up quickly, brow furrowed. “Is that happening this weekend somewhere?”

He’d throw out the seminar and ask Edrisa if she wanted to hit up a costume shop in preparation, if so. Disappointingly, Ainsley only chuckled at his expense and returned her attention to her food. He frowned but picked his phone back up to make a note to look into local reenactments.

“Oh, Malcolm, really,” Jessica scolded. “What have I said about screens at the table?”

“That when you do it, it’s imperative, and when we do it, it’s a direct attack against you.” It was a guess, but experience supported it.

Jessica dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “That wasn’t said. It was unspoken. Now promise me something.” She reached over, took his phone from his hand and set it down beside her own plate like he was twelve and brought his Game Boy to breakfast.

“Yes?” It was best to indulge her when doing so cost him nothing more than temporarily confiscated property.

“No matter what the officer that is doing your assessment today says, you will not spiral.” It was a command as much as it was motherly advice. “If he approves you to continue consulting, perhaps consider quitting on your own.” The eternal dream. Malcolm carefully did not react. He could indulge her there by not arguing if he refused to indulge the actual request. She spread her hands. “And if he deems the job unsuitable for you, c’est la vie. For my sake and the sake of your sister, embrace it as a challenge.” She was a somber stare away from total exasperation as she implored, “And for God’s sake, just go to your happy place.”

It was easy for her to say. Her happiness hinged on the idea of him one day extricating himself from all things murder related. What he thought of as his own happiness was actually the seesaw known as his mental health. He’d created a life for himself that kept that balance fairly even, and Officer Shadow had the power to drop one side to the ground and send him sailing through the air.

Ainsley and his mother leaned in to kiss his cheeks on either side as they departed, and Malcolm did his best to prepare himself for bad news as he started off to work, wondering what place in his mind could be happy enough to prevent him from spiraling if he didn’t hear what he wanted to today. He might have needed a compass and a very strong flashlight to find it.

****

It was midmorning, squatting beside the body of a curiously dead man while Edrisa explained her findings where she knelt at his side, that Malcolm realized that he did have a happy place. And it had nothing to do with work. Or murder. At least, not precisely.

JT and Dani kept a careful distance. Gil listened closely to Edrisa’s report and managed his disgust for the gruesome details with a controlled frown. Malcolm was the only one who caught her enthusiasm like it was airborne between them, and there beside the grotesque remains of a mysteriously murdered body, he smiled back at her. And it clicked.

Edrisa had to repeat herself twice on one point, because for the first time in his recollection, he was distracted from death by… life.

Huh.

****

_Check this out when you wake up!!_

It was two in the morning, and Malcolm was wide awake when the text from Edrisa came in. He clicked the link she sent with it, and the anxiety that came with his insomnia eased back like a slow tide pulling away from the shore. The weapons fair was coming back for a bonus weekend this Saturday.

Malcolm texted back: _Up for a walk?_

****

Malcolm was waiting for her on the steps of her apartment building when she came out, bundled in a fluffy coat over her pajamas. His heart gave a lurch at the sight of the cartoon rainbows and clouds on her cotton pants. It was amazing how susceptible he was to blind spots when his subconscious was confronted with an alien emotion. He had murder and mayhem locked down, but it took time to examine his own joy with any clarity.

“Hi!” Edrisa bounded down to where he was on the lower steps. “Good… night, I guess? But that makes it sound like we’re going to sleep. It’s too early for ‘good morning’, though. So, good night!”

Malcolm smiled. “Thanks for meeting me. Are you sure you’re not too tired? I know why I’m up—”

“Because you’re always up.”

“—but you’re usually asleep by now, right?”

“Yes.” She leaned back against the railing. “But I accidentally drank a bunch of coffee that I thought was decaf but really wasn’t, and now here we are. I don’t have to be in until the afternoon tomorrow, so it’s fine.”

“My good luck then,” Malcolm said and offered his elbow as he turned to go down the last steps. She took it, and they started down the quiet sidewalk.

There was no one around, every sane and uncaffeinated person was asleep by now. He enjoyed the rare, undisturbed feeling of solitude in the city. There was a peaceful quality to the night. He was used to walking these streets when his insomnia was at its worst, but those moments were always alone. It was a surprising comfort to be able to share that peace with Edrisa.

“So…” She was practically wincing as she broached the subject. “It was bad news then? You can’t consult for the police anymore?”

Malcolm sighed.

Officer Shadow waited until the evening to turn in his final assessment. His psych evaluation that afternoon was harder than his usual sessions with his normal therapist. There was no history between them, no sentimentality to allow leeway. He was a bit too adversarial, admittedly, and Shadow’s assessment had the power to tip an already tenuous situation over the edge.

“Gil called me when a decision had been reached,” he told her. His stomach had tightened, his pulse had picked up, and he’d braced himself for the worst by taking his mother’s advice and going to his happy place. They stopped at the street corner, and he turned to face her as he said, “I… am cleared to continue my work as a consultant.”

Edrisa’s eyes widened, and a split second later, a huge smile took over her face and she launched herself at him in a hug.

“Bright! That’s amazing!”

He closed his eyes a moment over her shoulder as he squeezed her back and gave her a smile and a nod as she bounced back on her heels.

“It is. And I’m relieved,” he was quick to add. “But I actually wanted to see you tonight to discuss what happened before I got the news.”

“Oh?” They started walking again, and Malcolm was tempted to change his mind, let it go, pretend he didn’t now know what he knew because that was easier. But he didn’t want to be the kind of person who found misery easier than joy.

He cleared his throat quietly and thought back to the panic he felt building up to the time he knew to expect a call from Gil. He was afraid of losing his routine, his outlet that made his obsession with murder productive, a meticulously designed structure that he depended on to keep him on the right side of his Whitly DNA. The thought of losing that was terrifying.

“I was worried to put it mildly.”

“Understandably! Gah, you would’ve totally lost it if you got fired from this after getting fired from the FBI. You’re running out of ways to get close to murder victims. You might have had to start making your own.” She laughed, but her smile faltered as she looked up at him. “For the record, that was not advice for you to go that route.”

“Never,” he assured her. “But it did make me think about how strongly that decision would have affected me. My mother suggested that I cope with the bad news by going to my happy place. Only, I didn’t think I had one.” Forward. Forward towards something good. Towards joy he was often too blinded by the siren call of death to acknowledge, let alone let himself have. “But I was wrong.”

He and Edrisa stood outside the glow of the streetlight, but she manufactured her own. It came from a place of goodness within her, a deeply embedded natural innocence that never failed to make him smile or laugh or walk away feeling better for having seen her. In many ways, she was the opposite of everything he knew about his father and everything he feared about himself. She was beautiful and lovely and kind, so kind he could hardly bear it because he was better at navigating pain than purity.

“I was sitting at home waiting to get that call from Gil and tried to refocus my mind on positive things. Something to ground me so I didn’t spin out, regardless of what news I received.” Malcolm’s relationship with happiness was on and off (mostly off), irregular, and never promised.

That wasn’t as true lately. Not when he had a whole bank of experiences to comb through. Trips and events that only Edrisa could truly appreciate. The fondness for the macabre that only she mirrored, encouraged, and thrived on at his side. Even more glaring were all of the little jolts of joy that sparked in him through a shared smile at a crime scene, that quick flare of mutual understanding when a fact clicked into place, the shared awe not only in the conclusion to a mystery but in the discovery of one.

It was all very clear once he knew what he was looking for. “I searched for my so-called happy place. And what I discovered was that you, Edrisa, are all my happy places.”

His eyes were adjusted well enough to the darkness to observe the nuances in her expression as it shifted subtly from uncertainty about his meaning to slow delight at his encouraging, hopeful smile. Encouraging, because he wanted her to understand even though it frightened him to reach for something so sweet, knowing from her open crush that he could take that sweetness for himself if he asked for it. Hopeful, because he was ready to ask, but she may not be ready to answer.

“So…” Edrisa looked down, and he followed her gaze to their hands as she reached out and took one of his, before catching his eye again. “I guess this means you want to go to the weapons fair with me this weekend?”

The corner of his lips twitched upward. “That article said there’s going to be a fencing tournament this time. Think we should sign up?”

“Ooh,” she said quietly, taking a step closer. Her smile was nervous, but her eyes were bright. “En garde. Pret.”

His pulse picked up as her other hand pressed flat and warm against his chest.

“Allez,” he murmured.

Edrisa pushed up on her tiptoes, and Malcolm cupped her cheek as he leaned in and pressed his lips to hers. It was sleepy and slow, one more place he could store away as happy. He wondered if her beginner’s luck covered love too, because neither of them scored the kiss but he still declared her the winner.

****

Malcolm waved pleasantly at a pair of cops that hated his guts when he walked by them at the weapons fair on Saturday afternoon and didn’t mind their pointed scowls at all. He’d gone to buy snow cones and went in search of Edrisa. They were supposed to meet at the booth for maces. He threaded his way through the crowd to find her, but this time he held back as he approached and found her with a heavy mace in her hands and an alarmed presenter advising against her swinging it. But swing, she did.

“I come in peace,” Malcolm said as she gave it a whirl, and the spiked ball sailed through the air.

She kept a firm grip on the chain and came to a stumbling stop, the mace hitting the grass with a thud. She grinned. “One more step, and you would have come in pieces.”

“Lesson learned,” he promised and held out his hand for her after Edrisa took the proffered snow cone. It was still cold from carrying it around, but Edrisa slipped her hand in his and warmed it up in no time. “Where to next?”

She practically bounced as she told him, “I heard there are gallows on the other side!”

It wasn’t laser tag with skeletons, but it promised a fun afternoon. The smile on Edrisa’s face and the certainty of her hand in his promised something even better. It wasn’t normalcy exactly, he thought as he smiled back at her, but he’d take happy over normal any day.


End file.
